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The New Tech that Aims to Make Methane Leaks a Thing of the Past

Around my house the phrase “methane explosions” tends to open up the door for the sorts of jokes teenage boys like to make, but as utilities deal with aging pipelines and the natural gas market continues to grow, the threat of methane leaks is no laughing matter. Northern California utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) found this out the hard way in 2010 when a faulty weld in its San Bruno pipeline gave way, leading to a massive explosion that destroyed multiple homes and killed eight people. Since then, the utility has been putting considerable resources into improving the safety of its infrastructure, including investing in cutting-edge methane-detecting technology.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based tech company Picarro has developed a vehicle-mounted surveying product that enables utilities to cruise around their territories, constantly on the look out for methane leaks. That job used to be conducted on foot, with hand-held devices, which only enabled the utility to spot-check pipelines, oftentimes when a customer reported a potential issue. “This is a complete game-changer,” says Steve Redding, PG&E’s Director of Maintenance and Construction. Redding has been in the utility business for more than 20 years and says it’s not just that Picarro enables monitoring for methane leaks from utility vehicles, but that it overlays leak information on service area maps and compares data against other known sources of methane (farm animals, for example) to ensure that what looks like a pipeline leak is definitely something worth investigating.

“We also now have that data digitally, in a database,” Redding says. “You used to have to go to a particular area, walk around on foot holding a device, and then write down your findings on paper.”

Taking that whole process digital means PG&E employees can cover more ground and be proactive about finding potential issues.

Picarro’s technology is also being embraced by the natural gas exploration industry, particularly as the process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”, continues to pick up steam. The company just released a product aimed specifically at measuring fugitive emissions at fracking and coal seam gas sites. To date no technology has been able to accurately measure and quantify the amount of methane emitted from fracking sites and other natural gas fields over a large scale. Everything has been done with estimates and modeling, leaving industry to claim less than 3 percent of all methane is lost in natural gas production, while scientists estimate losses of 9 percent or more.

“Our technology is a thousand times more sensitive–literally–than the technology currently being used by natural gas companies to estimate methane leaks,” says Michael Woelk, CEO of Picarro.

While scientists and local governments want to get a better read on fracking-related methane emissions to ensure public safety, Woelk says natural gas companies are also interested in the technology’s ability to help measure and reduce production losses. “There’s currently a lot of consternation and discussion around methane emissions in the natural gas industry, in terms of how much the natural gas industry is releasing into the air during production, in addition to the natural gas that’s just naturally seeping into the air,” Woelk says. “I think we’ll see from science that the emissions caused by natural gas production are way higher than the industry believes.”

That’s not to say that natural gas companies should stop what they’re doing, Woelk is quick to say, just that given the potential trouble that can be caused by methane emissions, it behooves natural gas exploration companies to have a realistic grasp on fugitive emissions.

“The industry would be smart to say we have a responsibility to get natural gas out of the ground cleanly and safely, and then we will be invited and permitted to go and get this resource,” Woelk says. “But if we don’t do it cleanly and safely, then we will be constrained in terms of access. That’s a critical issue.”

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